


Have you seen me?

by flambydelrabies



Category: Tales of Crestoria
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Multi, aegis reunites with his family, but i guarantee you will enjoy this much more if you do, not necessary to read Darling Lagomorph first, tissues recommended
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-25
Updated: 2021-01-25
Packaged: 2021-03-17 15:07:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28976370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flambydelrabies/pseuds/flambydelrabies
Summary: Vicious said back that maybe, he'd take Aegis to go see them, one day-- that he could keep the enforcers at bay if it meant Aegis could hold his family one last time.If nothing else, Vicious was a man of his word. Part 2 toDarling Lagomorph.
Relationships: Aegis Alver/Vicious
Comments: 3
Kudos: 40





	Have you seen me?

**Author's Note:**

> This was a request/suggestion of sorts, and once the thought was planted I couldn’t not entertain it. This is a very emotion-heavy fic, even by my standards, so get those tissues ready.
> 
> This fic was named after missing children on milk cartons, but the song “Have You Seen Me” by Nicole Dollanganger is definitely recommended listening. Obligatory disclaimer that this was written after chapter 6 and may end up being debunked by canon later on. Warning for referenced sexual assault near the end, but please do enjoy in the meantime.

Aegis was convinced, once, that the last thing he'd see before he died was white. 

The blaze of the sun growing brighter until it burned through the whites of his eyes, maybe. Maybe the moment his soul left his body he'd see the silver of his mother's hair shining like moonlight again, just as it did in his dreams. Maybe everything would just fade out, winking it all out of existence until there was nothing but white for the rest of time. It was fitting, then, that the only time he'd embraced the idea of death was at the hands of enforcers, cloaked in ivory, seeking justice for something he could never do. 

It was even crueller irony that the day he stumbled back through the woods where it all began, snow razed the ground and turned the world  _ white _ . It would have been the easiest thing in the world to lie upon the frost-stricken earth and accept that he truly had died in that dungeon with open arms. 

For what it was worth, Aegis was starting to believe he might just die here, too. 

“Hey, Aegis.”

He stopped, felt the way his footsteps fell into place against the miserable crunch of ice, and when he tore his gaze from the ground he saw not white, but black.

“You really sure you wanna go through with this?” Vicious asked from a few, short paces behind, brows dipped low and without a single shred of emotion in his tone. Aegis looked over like a dazed sleepwalker as he spoke.

“If I don’t now, then I know that I never will.”

If nothing else, Vicious took note of the tension heavy in Aegis’ frame and had the decency not to argue. After all, this was his vow, that tiny shred of hope he’d promised Aegis on that day that Vicious knew he could never feel for himself. Family had always been no more than wounds and sores to him. There was no world in which he could be happy, but maybe Aegis could.

Vicious figured he owed him that much.

"Then do you at least know where you're going?" He jabbed at Aegis just as much as he challenged him, and both hesitated around a moment of silence. Before long, Aegis ground to a halt with that military-grade order he knew so well; Vicious was a generous stride ahead when he noticed and followed in tune. 

"I used to play in these woods as a child. I could never forget." Aegis traced, then retraced the steps in his head, allowing something in him to burn until it scorched up into his veins. "After what happened, I thought that I could never come back. That a Transgressor like me didn’t deserve to."

The shadows of the forest were beginning to deepen as the sun set, turning the frosted trees into something dreamlike. Even in the midst of it all, it was no surprise when Vicious shook his head and offered no reassurance. 

"You said yourself it's now or never, yeah? Get moving. We got until sunrise, then everyone else wakes up and realizes we're gone."

Aegis always knew the way home, following the tracks he'd imprinted into the dirt as a child with those worn-down shoes they couldn't afford to replace. He remembered it like losing his baby teeth, like the first time his father called him not a boy but a man, like the dull smell of sterility in the shop, of realizing his goal of righteousness and embracing justice. Of the day he got the letter from the academy. Of the King and the Queen. Of--

_ (AEGIS PLEASE TELL ME YOU LOVE ME EVEN IF IT'S A LIE--) _

Of Medagal. 

When he passed a posterboard on the edge of the forest, Aegis looked upon the notice artlessly pasted in place until the colour in his cheeks drained away. 

A crude portrait of his own face stared back at him until he grimaced, threading the tips of his fingers below the poster and  _ tearing _ until it was no more than ribbons of ink and parchment. If not for the phrase  _ Have you seen me? _ scrawled next to the scarlet letters spelling MURDERER, he'd almost thought it was a missing person's poster for the child Medagal had killed long ago. 

"Aegis," Vicious growled, cupping a hand around the other's wrist, "If you can't do this after all, fine. We turn back and that's how it ends. But the wrong person sees you, and we're all dead, ya hear me?" 

Aegis seethed without words, each breath running ragged in his chest, and he couldn't tell if Vicious' words were making it better or worse. 

"And I don't just mean us. Them, too."

Aegis shut his eyes and tapped an uneven rhythm against his palm. Expecting this excursion to hurt didn't stop it from hurting. "This town doesn't even have Vision Central, Vicious. Word must have spread from the Kingdom."

"Parents are supposed to love you anyway, aren't they? Not that I'd know a hell of a lot about that," Vicious said before lapsing into a quick silence. "I'll wait outside. Enforcers show up, and I start shootin'."

"No," Aegis replied with a foreign sense of ferocity. His gloved hand came to weave around Vicious' wrist. "I want you to come with me."

Vicious pinched his brows together, but even he could admit the certainty in Aegis’ voice was reassuring. “Can’t say I’ve ever done the whole  _ ‘meet the parents’ _ deal before. The Great Transgressor ain’t exactly someone most people want to bring home to mom and dad.”

Aegis stopped where the rugged forest trails met village pathways and he closed his eyes, but stayed dead still. That certainty in his ever-churning mind was already beginning to falter.

“I asked you to stay with me once, didn’t I?” Aegis’ pulse was a steady thud in his chest, his throat, the fingertips still threaded around Vicious’ arm. “I don’t want them to meet the Great Transgressor. I want them to meet the boy who showed me that I deserve to live, even still.”

And those words ate at Vicious to such a degree it was grotesque, left with wide eyes and some sort of expression on his face that he was only thankful Aegis couldn’t see. When he broke from Aegis’ iron grip, Vicious rested that same, calloused hand against his knight’s uniform and spoke simple, compact words.

“Then let’s go, yeah?”

When Aegis opened his eyes, he nodded in return, feeling that cruel tug of nostalgia at the corners of his mind upon laying eyes on his hometown for the first time since he was an innocent, guiltless child. Hardly anything had changed but a new season’s frostbite, and he couldn’t tell if that made it any easier or only so much more heartbreaking.

Such a backwoods village was hardly more than a blip on the map-- a merchant’s town, if nothing else, where peddlars and traders would stop to sell their wares on their way to Medagal. He remembered how so many would stop by the store and he smiled for them while he toyed with the fraying seams of his rags. Now, they’d probably be far less forgiving, and there was no way he’d ever smile like that again with all the bile in his mouth.

And then he was right, when he and Vicious passed a shopkeep who was closing down for the night and watched them with the disdain of a hateful maggot. Aegis had learned that look well by this point, memorized it until it burned into his consciousness and ate at his insides until, uncharacteristically, he shot back.

“Do I look like someone you know?” he said, until each word clipped out of frigid anger and only Vicious’ heat could hold him back.

“C’mon. Every second you spend on petty fights is one less you actually have to do what ya came here for.”

Aegis followed in his wake, and even he, himself could never believe he’d become so jaded.

“This is it,” he stopped before a wooden door that crackled along the edges, and something in him wondered if he’d regret this, if he should give up and retreat the same way he’d done so many times before.

Vicious read his mind, somehow, just as he always did. “Still time to turn around, y’know. No skin off my back.”

Aegis considered it, deliberated, and even the way his hand felt resting against the doorknob left him remembering feeling so warm and lovely and  _ young  _ that he knew he couldn’t leave, not yet.

When the door swung open, nothing could have numbed the pang in his chest when he laid eyes on the endless shelves of wine bottles and whiskey, just as he remembered them, and nothing could have softened the next blow.

“Sorry, we’re closed,” a voice rang from the top of the stairs, shrouded behind the veil of weathered wood grain. Aegis’ steady heartbeat turned rapid when he saw a woman in tattered clothes descending the stairs.

“We’d just like a moment of your time,” he said, and prayed that his frantic voice didn’t waver.

When she reached the landing, he knew it could be no-one else-- silver hair and weary, sunken eyes. They were risking everything just for this one, single visit, and if anyone were to damn him to hell, he could only hope it would be her.

“I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to ask you to--” she began, only to find herself face-to-face with what may have been a ghost. Her entire body flinched as if she’d been struck.

“Mom,” he choked out and stumbled forward, hesitating, before weaving his arms around the only thing that ever truly break him, and he’d let her in a heartbeat. There was silence as he held her, broken only by the heaving of both their chests, and for a moment alone, Aegis stood and gripped the last, beautiful part of himself he had left. Within seconds, she embraced him back, and Aegis couldn’t tell who the tears on his cheeks belonged to anymore.

_ “Aegis,”  _ she whispered, handling him as if he’d shatter in her arms. He felt a bitter sting against his heart, against his Stain, and all he wanted was to convince himself that it was unfounded. She never asked for a Transgressor for a son, and Goddess, what she must think of his face plastered all over the Kingdom--

“Mom,” he choked back again with a lump in his throat so thick, he worried he’d asphyxiate on the spot. And still, somehow, he continued, even as he strangled out every word. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry-- I’m sorry I stopped writing, I’m sorry I’m--”

She accepted each apology without words, the same way she took him back with open arms and let him bleed each of his pleas into the crook of her neck.

“Please, let’s go upstairs,” she said, and her heart wept just as much as the rest of her. “Aegis… welcome home.”

Aegis turned back to Vicious, who stood slinking against the door with his fists shoved loosely into that impossible black coat. He raised a single brow when Aegis beckoned him closer.

“I want you to come too,” Aegis told him with tears still lining his red-rimmed eyes. Vicious was the one deliberating now, not wanting to ruin whatever he could even  _ think _ to call this moment, but all his competing thoughts and responses eventually told him they’ve come this far already;  _ he owes him this much. _

When they reached the top of the stairs Aegis nearly fell to his knees and wept, much like that thirteen-year-old boy once did when he received the fated letter from Medagal. His face paled with wide, haunted eyes as though face-to-face with a phantom, but really, the only ghost here was him, someone so terribly disparate from the boy who dreamed of knights and justice.

“I… wasn’t expecting you. Please, sit. I’ll make your favourites for dinner.”

Aegis winced as she scurried across the kitchen, caught up in his own tragedy as he saw his childhood home exactly as he remembered it. The Stain over his heart burned. He didn’t deserve her kindness.

“We can’t stay long. If anyone finds out we’re here, they’ll--” 

He couldn’t say it, he couldn’t let the words leave his mouth, couldn’t even force himself even with the threat of death over their heads. It was enough that his mother knew he was a sinner; if she knew all their lives were in danger from this meeting alone-- the least he could do was try to keep those loathsome thoughts at bay.

Before long, his mother laid three plates against the table, each of the portions just as dainty as they’d always been. When she took a seat across from them, the warmth of her smile could have made Vicious ill. He certainly wasn’t used to such hospitality.

“Who did you bring with you?” she asked her son, extending a too-terribly kind gaze to Vicious at his side. For a moment, he looked to Aegis, who looked directly back, and began a  _ “He’s my…” _ before taking a pause sharp enough to cut the silence in two. Both Aegis and Vicious spoke in unison.

“Bodyguard.”

“Partner.”

Vicious found himself clicking his teeth at Aegis’ bold declaration until he smiled another sly grin and draped an arm around Aegis’ shoulder, because if that’s what Aegis wanted, then why stop there?

“I’m sure you expected me to bring a woman home one day,” Aegis said as though the words would swallow him whole. “I apologize if this isn’t… what you’d hoped for.”

“Aegis,” she began, voice choked in remorse as she flitted a strand of silver hair from her eyes, “I never expected you to come home at all. The things the merchants from the capitol have been saying-- the wanted posters… your father and I, we didn’t even know if you were alive.”

“Don’t listen to them,” he pleaded out of some form of self-deprecating desperation-- “The things they say about me… they’re not true. I-- I didn’t kill her. I didn’t kill anyone.”

“I was there. That bastard of a King framed him.” Vicious pulled Aegis just a little closer, so unlike someone who lived up to his namesake, and Aegis leaned into the touch. “He tried to save her. Was a noble knight up to the end.”

Aegis reached out his hand and entwined his fingers around his mother’s only to stare down at the plate before him, still untouched. He shook in Vicious’ arms.

“I knew you could never do the things they accused you of. But the people… they do. They wish for you to die, Aegis.” Her hand gripped tighter, thumbing against his white, polished glove, stirring emotions he couldn’t place in the pit of his chest as she continued. “The store has been suffering ever since what happened. The townspeople hardly shop here anymore, and the merchants coming from Medagal all talk about the Commander who seduced and killed the queen…”

Aegis shrank in his own skin at those words, reeling forward to shield his eyes with his free hand. When he dug his fingers in, he saw stars.

“I’m sorry,” he muttered helplessly. “I… didn’t want any of this. Not for me, and especially not for you. Never for you.”

They stayed like that, together and silent, until Vicious brought a hand up to thread through Aegis’ hair while the boy in his arms wept as much as his pride would allow.

“Where is Father?” Aegis finally asked, never once looking up from the curtain of silver hair in front of his eyes. “He’s still here, right?”

Mother was weary when she looked back, that same fatigue scribed all over her body the moment she said “He’s here, but he’s... not well.”

“I need to see him. Please,” Aegis begged and pleaded like he was some sort of cornered animal, and yet, her voice was so very kind and  _ gentle _ in return.

“Ever since word spread from the kingdom, he hardly eats or speaks. Maybe if he could see you’re alive…”

“Mom, I--” he began, wiping tears from his eyes while she released his hand, rose from the table, and nodded for him to come closer. When Aegis staggered to his feet, Vicious loomed over him like a shadow, a coal-black silhouette among relics of the past, and when he took Aegis’ hand in his own, Vicious became the only thing anchoring him to the present. When he opened the door to his parents’ room, all of it muscle-memory familiar, Aegis clung desperately to the hand woven around his own with tears pooled in his eyes.

“Dad,” he whispered and watched as his father sat, catatonic, facing the window at the end of the bed. When Aegis stumbled to seat himself next to the older, frail man, Vicious flanked him on the opposite side like a bookend and smoothed the leather of his glove against Aegis’ own in those soft, rhythmic motions he knew so well.

“When the merchants from the city brought word of what happened to you, he was devastated. He never really recovered…” Mother paused and watched as Aegis collapsed to his father’s shoulder, and Aegis only prayed to a Goddess who cursed his very existence that his sin wouldn't seep from his body and infect one of the only good things left in this world.

“Maybe if you talked to him for a while,” she started, then stopped, staring from the window and into the stars. “I know you can’t stay long. Let me know when you have to leave.” When she shut the door behind her, Aegis pretended not to hear her weeping.

Vicious muttered at the ground, so uncharacteristically quiet for someone like him. “We leave at sunrise, Aegis. But if you need more time, I ain’t stopping you.”

Aegis wept on his father’s shoulder, who sat unmoving and comatose, and every whimper knocked the breath from his lungs.

“This was my fault. If I hadn’t-- if the King hadn’t--”

“It wasn’t your fault and you know it,” Vicious shot back with the most venom in his voice he’d donned since leaving their friends in the next village over. His words made Aegis waver, even if only for a moment, until he slouched against the wall behind him and lifted his head to stare into the moon. After everything was said and done, he curled a fist and sighed.

“You know, Dad, justice isn’t anything like I thought it’d be.” Aegis nearly expected a response back, but reality was hardly so kind. Instead, he sat slumped against the wall with heavy eyes, one hand entwined with his father’s and the other grasping against Vicious like a lifeline.

That morning, he watched the sun rise, the hues of dawn and dusk enveloping the snow and ice just as it did when he was a naive child, but it would never be the same. Not since the kingdom taunted him with a broken spirit and a Stain over his heart. When he saw his dilapidated reflection in the window’s morning light, he watched himself shatter from a distance.

Reality was cruel, and so was everything else.

“Aegis?”

The single word knocked him like a fist to the sternum, and by the time he broke from his fever dream, that same, familiar voice began to rasp once more.

“Aegis… is that really you?” his father murmured to his right, chapped lips moving but hardly speaking. Aegis’ bloodshot eyes widened in disbelief.

“Dad!? Dad, I--”

The moment was brazenly interrupted before it began by a  _ crash, bang, screech _ echoing directly outside the store, so unexpected from the village that Vicious sprang to his feet and summoned one of his guns in a blaze of crimson red. When he looked to the window, he grabbed Aegis by the shoulder and uttered at him through clenched teeth.

“Enforcers are here. We’re leaving, now.”

“But--” Aegis said back in some kind of half-protest, half-plea, but he knew just as well as Vicious did that if they stayed, they’d be digging all of their graves. He felt himself pulled along as if by weight of a current rather than the drag of Vicious’ arm around his, and when Vicious kicked open the door, all of it felt even less real than it had to begin with.

“Aegis!” his mother exclaimed, this time without that sunshine smile that burned into each and every memory, but a grimace of pain and horror. When she extended her arm to lock their fingers together one last time, he reached back until Vicious dragged him from sight.

_ (REACHING, AND YET, STILL--) _

“I love you, Aegis-- I  _ love you, _ and I’m  _ proud of you, _ and you’ll always be my  _ son, _ and--”

His throat was paralyzed as he looked upon her pleading eyes, those same ones that  _ (PLEASE AEGIS),  _ and he couldn’t say it back and  _ (PLEASE TELL ME YOU LOVE ME), _ and as Vicious dragged him down those stairs he knew so well he fought against whatever it was that suffocated him, and  _ (PLEASE AEGIS EVEN IF IT’S A LIE, EVEN IF IT'S JUST A LIE--) _

“I love you!” he screamed back through tears until he felt himself choke, because even if he couldn’t say it then he had to say it now when it mattered more than ever. “I love you! I _ love you! _ ” he shouted at her until his throat became hoarse-- 

When Vicious took him down the stairs and out the door, all he could think about was how much she looked like Rebecca in those last, awful moments.

Upon stepping into the winter air, there were three of them-- three enforcers with cloaks that matched the sleet and snow. Vicious summoned his other blood sin in a flash and raised the barrel of his gun to meet the empty hoods staring back.

“You want me to take this one? At least this time, you got an excuse for being dead weight.”

Aegis shook his head and wiped the tears that prickled his cheeks; within moments, he held his glowing spear between his fingertips and prepared to fight.

Death was no longer an option. The only way to go anymore was forward; he would not let himself see white.

**+**

  
  


When the enforcers dissolved into no more than grime and glow against the frostbitten soil, Vicious took Aegis by the hand, 

and they ran,

and they ran,

and they ran,

until they found themselves stumbling back through the forest. The heels of their boots clattered against the ice until they were far enough away that Vicious was certain they’d lost their faceless pursuers among the barren winter and starless dawn. Another poster of Aegis’ face glared among the landscape of endless white -  _ HAVE YOU SEEN ME? _ , it taunted alongside the howling wind. When their feet ground to a halt, Aegis collapsed his cheek into the cusp of his hand and let himself falter.

“Well? Did you get what you wanted?” Vicious asked him with both hands rested against his hips. Aegis chose not to respond; he’d already split himself open enough by now.

“It wasn’t your fault, y’know,” he continued, just for the sake of cutting the silence. “What happened to you, and what happened to them--”

Vicious stopped when Aegis fisted a glove below his collar and dragged Vicious close enough he could make eye contact without dipping his head upwards. “And it’s not fair,” Aegis scraped through gritted teeth, and when tears clouded his vision once more, he didn’t want to imagine just how pathetic he looked in that moment.

“You think any of this was ever meant to be fair? Nothing’s fair, kid.” Vicious brought a hand up to grasp against Aegis’, feeling the way the boy before him shook and shivered in desperation. “You did nothing wrong, you got condemned for it, and now yer a big, bad transgressor like the rest of us. That’s life.”

“Stop it,” Aegis growled through a sob, fighting against the metallic taste in his mouth from biting his tongue.

“Am I wrong?” Vicious said back with a slyness in his half-smile. “You really think you deserved what happened to you, and what it did to them? Gimme an honest answer.”

_ “Stop it!” _ Aegis shouted, and by now, he’d buried his eyes into the junction between Vicious’ neck and shoulder. The frigid air turned his ink-black clothes cold and damp with Aegis’ tears. “Stop it,” he said again, muffled by the rough fabric of Vicious’ coat, but the words no longer carried the same weight.

Vicious sighed at the tragedy but kept his composure, because one of them had to be the strong one. “You know, this whole ‘family’ thing… I get it now. Guess I can see why it’s important to you.”

Aegis stopped and tried to recompose, swallowing down the whirlwind of emotion from the last twenty-four hours that threatened to pull him under. When he stared up at Vicious once more, Vicious had never seen him look so timid and mild.

“Can’t say I know much about the whole family thing, never had one myself.” Vicious tipped a finger under Aegis’ chin and felt each of his breaths even into a steady rhythm. “But they really seem to believe in you, yeah?”

Aegis shook his head back. “Nobody else ever has.”

“You think I don’t believe in you?” Vicious bit back like a dog without canines. A snake without venom. Aegis flinched all the same.

“I don’t believe in myself,” he said and the desolation of frost and snow surrounding them rang in his ears. It was all so loud. So  _ much. _ “They-- even when I thought I couldn’t be anything, they still thought I could be something.”

“So do we. Kanata, Misella, Yuna. And me.” The colour in Aegis’ cheeks began to return as Vicious spoke, his skin equally as raw as the words coming from the other man’s mouth. “You’re only as alone as you think you are,” Vicious said, and nobody but Aegis could have believed the Great Transgressor could be so  _ gentle. _

He looked back up at Vicious, doe-eyed and strung out on so much love he could nearly drown in it. When their gazes locked, Aegis commanded  _ “kiss me” _ , and Vicious did.

Aegis always thought that the last thing he’d see before he died was white. The white desolation of the winter forests, the cloaks of the beasts who diligently sought their demise. Maybe after all was said and done, he’d died at the hands of enforcers and let himself rot in the ice and snow.

Aegis still remembered being trapped in the King's chambers while something in him writhed in pain, something he hardly knew existed-- each time, he looked upon the portrait of Kasque and begged her to take him home. 

Now that he had a taste of everything he'd lost, he figured, just maybe, something in him had to die so the rest of him could live. 


End file.
